Steam’s Wishlist Function Is Missing One Crucial Feature

Lists within lists within lists

By Toussaint Egan | October 13, 2025 | 3:30pm

Video Games Features Steam

Steam’s Wishlist Function Is Missing One Crucial Feature

This week marks one of my absolute favorite game events of the entire year: the October Steam Next Fest. For those who don’t know, Valve has hosted a triannual, week-long digital “celebration” via its digital distribution platform Steam every February, June, and October since 2020, spotlighting new and upcoming games to its over 132 million monthly active users.

Steam Next Fest has become one of the many online-exclusive events, like Nintendo’s Nintendo Direct series and Sony’s State of Play presentations, to fill the vacuum left in the wake of the Electronic Entertainment Expo’s end in 2023. It’s virtually a win-win for everyone involved: Players get to go hands-on with newly announced games via demos (some of which are only available during the fest); Valve gets more users interacting with its platform; and developers and publishers get to gauge potential sales from players who wishlist their games, which in turn boosts their overall visibility on Steam’s storefront and Discovery Queue function.

steam wishlist

Just one problem, though. As of this writing, I have over 900 games on my Steam wishlist (943, to be precise). That is precisely too many damn games to have on any one list. You may read that and be thinking, “Why don’t you just delete some of those games off your wishlist?,” but the problem is that I don’t want to delete games off my wishlist. What I want is for Valve to finally allow Steam users to create their own sub-lists with their main Steam wishlist, similar to how users are able to create customizable “categories” through their Steam game libraries.

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Since it was first introduced in September 2019, Steam’s category function has been invaluable in helping me organize my games library (as well as my hard drive space). I have a category for my favorite games (Echo, The Forever Winter, Fallout New Vegas, etc.); a category for recent games I’m playing at the moment (Clair Obsur: Expedition 33, Silent Hill f); and a category for games I’d like to write about in the near future (That one’s a secret, sorry). It’s the best kind of feature, the kind that honestly should have been implemented way sooner than it was, but that I’m nonetheless thankful for, which is precisely why I wish Steam wishlists would get the same treatment.

The Steam wishlist allows users to track games they’re interested in, how long they’ve been wishlisted, and alert them to ongoing sales of their wishlisted games, among other things. You can choose to sort your wishlist by a number of variables (i.e., alphabetically, price, discounts, review score, etc.), with the exception, of course, of the ability to sort said wishlisted games into more focused categories.

What if, for instance, I want to make a more focused list of Deus Ex-inspired immersive sims I’m looking forward to (ex. Core Decay, Deep State, Spectra); or stylish stealth games (ex. Relooted, Sleight of Hand, Snap & Grab, Thick as Thieves); or retail-themed horror games (ex. Night of the Consumers, Service with a Shotgun, Shift at Midnight, Hellmart); or Napoleonic survival-horror games (ex. Hunger, Valor Mortis, No Vacation for an Executioner); or Sifu-like action brawlers (ex. Acts of Blood, Dead as Disco, Spine – This is Gun Fu, Tenet of the Spark) within my larger wishlist? Up to this point, my only answer has been to individually arrange these games into blocks of three or so titles within my now 900-plus gaming wishlist. As you can imagine, this is an exhausting and imperfect solution, leaving many titles that I would otherwise be psyched to follow and play buried near the middle to bottom of my wishlist.

To be perfectly clear, I’m not complaining about the enormous number of games I’ve wishlisted. That’s my own fault; but really, can you blame me? There’s an absolute embarrassment of riches when it comes to upcoming games on the horizon worth being excited for, each with their own unique and fascinating ideas to offer players, and I have no doubt that this week’s Steam Next Fest will introduce even more new games for me to add to my wishlist.

I want to support developers, especially up-and-coming indie developers who would otherwise be boxed out for attention by larger, more well-known franchises and publishers. But I also want to be able to organize a wishlist in a way that will allow me to give each of my wishlisted games the time and attention that they deserve. Allowing users to create their own custom wishlist categories would be a win-win for Steam users, Valve, and developers alike. It would be a net-plus feature for Steam as a service, and I can only hope that someone at Valve finally catches on to that fact.

Toussaint Egan is a culturally omnivorous writer and editor with over a decade of experience writing about games, animation, movies, and more. You can find him on Bluesky.